Ware gives Christie a run for her money

One by One pays homage to And Then There Were None

One by One Ruth Ware Gallery/scout

Ever since her debut thriller, In a Dark, Dark Wood, came out in 2015, Ruth Ware has been dubbed “the new Agatha Christie.”

Over the past five years, Ware has produced five suspense novels, each one markedly different from its predecessor.

One by One is the most brazenly Christie-ish, directly taking inspiration from And Then There Were None (1940).

In Christie's novel, a group of strangers is lured to an isolated house on an island, where a psycho prunes the guest list. In Ware's tale, the characters are summoned to a private retreat in the French Alps where avalanches tremble and guests are picked off, one by one — a simple premise for a suspense tale. The best ones usually are.

The opening of One by One refers to a BBC News story about twin tragedies in the exclusive French ski resort: The first catastrophe is an avalanche that killed six people; the second is the murder of four Britons in a ski chalet cut off by the avalanche. All of the guests worked at Snoop, which makes a successful music app.

The Snoop workmates are as hip as their product. Snoop has become such a sensation that a stupendous buyout offer is on the table. One of Snoop's co-founders wants to take the money and run; the other is adamantly against the buyout. The votes of other employees who own shares have broken evenly on both sides. The deciding vote turns out to be a former low-level employee. Liz is a fade-into-the-woodwork type of gal, and because she quit the company some time ago, she's deeply uneasy about being summoned back into the Snoop fold.

Liz is one of two first-person narrators, alternating chapters with Erin, who works as the host of the chalet. Both women turn out to be hiding nasty secrets behind their mild exteriors. Part of the great pleasure of reading One by One lies in rereading key passages and realizing how dim one was (as a reader) the first time round. Much of the crucial information is out in the open, right there on the page in dialogue and description, but Ware expertly scatters red herrings galore so that even the most alert reader becomes diverted into false deductions and dead ends.

Like Christie, Ware prefers to have her killings transpire “offstage,” making One by One that increasingly rare literary achievement: a non-grisly thriller.